BOISE -- Saturday night's mass stabbing in Boise is rattling many people in our community, including our first responders who witnessed the horror of the brutality up close.
We may sometimes forget that first responders are human, too. Saturday's horrific and terrifying attack affected dozens of families, as well as dozens of emergency responders who rushed out to the Wylie Street Station Apartments to help.
The trauma and impacts of handling something so violent can be lasting, so local agencies such as the Boise Fire Department and Boise Police Department have resources in place to help their own cope with tragedies like this.
In dispatch audio from responders first to arrive on scene, you hear distraught emergency personnel, audibly near tears and increasingly frantic:
"Advise medics that there's some child victims on Wylie Lane..."
"Multiple child victims or one child victim?"
"Responding to the location on Wylie lane for two victims, apparently we have another victim down inside the apartment that we're still looking for."
A bit later in the dispatch recording, a first responder said over the radio, choking up at the end:
"We need another medic... (inaudible) 4613, apartment 4643... It appears the victim is going into shock."
911 DISPATCH AUDIO: Listen to emergency responders at the Boise mass stabbing
"The incident Saturday night was pretty tough on everybody. But they rose to the occasion and did heroic things and just exactly what we hoped they would do under those circumstances," Boise Police Department Capt. Ron Winegar said, "Having said that, it certainly does take a toll anytime a child is injured, and in this case multiple children severely injured. That is tough for anybody to deal with,
"Anybody who has a heart, who is a human - which is exactly who we hire to be police officers - that's difficult to deal with. And so to say that they can deal with that and it to not have any effect on them and their personal life or even professional life would be problematic. It's just impossible."
"Usually the full impact of what you see on those types of calls doesn't really set in until after you're done with the work you have to do and you have some time to kind of catch your breath and start thinking about all the things you just encountered, the things you saw, the things you heard and such," Boise Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Rasulo told KTVB.
Boise children among 9 victims in mass stabbing at State Street apartments
Many emergency responders didn't get a chance to catch their breath after Saturday night because they had to respond out a deadly officer-involved shooting on Sunday.
Boise Police is calling the stabbing the most violent single attack in the department's history, with eight people wounded and a three-year-old little girl now dead.
"The fact that many people were injured in one location on one incident itself, itself can be kind of overwhelming. And then when you start adding kids and oftentimes... a good number of the responders have kids themselves. So some people will say they actually see their kids' faces when they look at one of the kids that we go on that are injured," Rasulo said.
"The types of things officers paramedics and firefighters respond to are not normal events. They are very, very abnormal events and we have very normal reactions to abnormal events," Capt. Winegar added. "There has to be an outlet, there has to be a healthy way to cope with stress and tragedy and trauma."
To handle that trauma and process what they experienced, Boise police and fire departments both have peer support teams.
"We train in critical incident stress management," Winegar said. "There are certain protocols we follow in critical incident stress management. And we also just cover the gamut of things. Peer support is just that: Somebody who has been through something similar before that can help somebody else through the same kind of a thing."
The agencies say they follow certain protocols post critical incident, like hold a stress debriefing and do "initial diffusing" on scene or immediately after.
"These are other firefighters and responders who are trained to help people work through these types of issues. So immediately following that incident - while the firefighters were still on scene and at the hospital - we brought members of the peer support team in to do initial diffusing," Rasulo said, "Just giving the firefighters and emergency responders there on scene an opportunity to talk about what they saw, what they experienced."
"We just feel it important to help each other through those things," Capt. Winegar added.
If officers and firefighters want to talk to a mental health professional, the fire and police departments will connect them to their psychologists or psychiatrists they contract with who specialize in working with first responders.
"Everybody has different means of dealing with what they see and encounter," Rasulo told KTVB. "We're doing a better job recognizing it and trying to take steps to help our members."
Vigil for victims of mass stabbing in Boise
Together with members of their peer support teams and outside resources, Boise police and fire say their people are pulling through - and ready to handle the next call for service.
"Everybody is going to carry that call with them that was on that call. That is one of those life-changing calls for the family, bystanders who observed what occurred, bystanders who tried to help, as well as all the responders. Those are one of those calls that long after their career ends they'll remember that day and they'll remember really specific things that occurred during that call," Rasulo said.
"Our hearts go out to the victims and families involved in this incident. There is no doubt this was a horrific, traumatic incident in our community and it impacted many people - and it will be a lifelong impact for them," Winegar said,
"And it impacted us, as well. And our officers, our paramedics, firefighters that responded to that scene will be forever changed. It makes us who we are but if we have hearts, which we do, then we recognize that it sometimes hurts, and we can draw strength from one another."